Diet drink explosion

I've gone back on Atkins (down 6 pounds in the first week), which means that I'm off my beloved RC Cola. Just when our local Safeway started carrying it, after the six years we've been here, too. Of course, I'm pounding the water, but I can't drink just water all the time. I very rarely drink coffee, and I don't drink tea, iced or hot. I pretty much hate the taste of aspartame, but we've found a variety of decent diet drinks that are palatable. I've noticed that there seems to be a bunch of new drinks, though. I picked up a bunch of bottles of new and old diet drinks to try, and I can report on some of them:

Colas:

• Diet Coke: Awful. I don't understand how people willingly drink this swill. Nasty, nasty, nasty aftertaste. I'll only drink this when I'm in a restaurant if there are no other alternatives.
• Diet Vanilla Coke: Blech. All the terrible taste of Diet Coke, overlaid with a foul vanilla flavor! Thanks, I'll pass.
• Coca-Cola Zero: This one is new. Better than Diet Coke, but still doesn't quite hit the mark. Less aspartame, less aftertaste. Interestingly, it tastes better after it's been out of the refrigerator for awhile.
• Diet Pepsi: I'm not in love with it, but I'll willingly drink it, which is more than I can say for Diet Coke.
• Diet Pepsi with Lime: Another new release, I think. I like this more than regular Diet Pepsi. I may buy more of it.
• Diet-Rite: Sweetened with Splenda, but still tastes icky.

Not Colas:

• Diet Dr. Pepper: If you like regular Dr. Pepper (I like it every once in a while), you will probably like this. Not much aftertaste.
• Diet A&W Root Beer: Quite good. If I liked root beer more, I'd drink this a lot.
• Diet A&W Cream Soda: Very good. Can be hard to find. I like this for a change of pace. Of course, what I really like is the full-calorie versions of either IBC Cream Soda or Dr. Brown's Cream Soda. Sigh.
• Diet Cherry 7UP: Surprisingly good. Not much aftertaste. This was a surprise to me, as Cherry 7UP wasn't anything that I drank before.
• Tropicana Light Lemonade: I like it. Decent lemon flavor, and the citrus cuts away the aspartame aftertaste. It's non-carbonated, too, which is a nice change. This one isn't entirely calorie- or carb-free. This and the Diet Cherry 7UP are the mainstays for dinner.

Still to try: Diet Pepsi Twist with Lemon, Diet Coke with Splenda, and Diet RC. Do you have a favorite diet drink that I haven't mentioned? Tell me about it in the comments!

Things to do in Healdsburg

Some friends of ours are coming to our little town to visit in a couple of weeks (although we're hoping to convince them to stay), and I'm keeping an eye out for fun things to do while they're visiting. Here's one: Pick-Your-Own Lavender Harvest. $40 gets you a bucket, twine, shears, and assistance as needed.

Poking around some more at the Lavender Hill Vineyards site, I found their Villa Arriba Homestay page. From now on, we're recommending this place for anyone coming to visit. It's much cheaper than any of the places in town, and the pictures look just amazing. All this, breakfast, and broadband Wi-Fi, for only $120-$175/night? That's cheap for around here (in comparison, the local Best Western starts at about $100/night, no breakfast, no in-room Wi-Fi, no view).

I found this via looking at sarahb's del.icio.us links. I don't know who she is, but if you do and she's looking for H'burg wedding locations (which it looks like she is), tell her that we highly recommend Madrona Manor. We got married there; we think that everyone else should, too.

Apple Store resident

I guess if you're homeless in SF, there are worse places to spend all day than in an Apple Store. It's starting to become a meme on Flickr: here's the same person on June 17, June 22, and July 7. See this blog post by Jim Heid for the details.

OTOH, if you're going to spend all your time in an Apple Store theater, it is a little tacky to be using a Windows laptop...

Gecko Stone

A follow up to yesterday's post: there may not be Escher Lizard paving stones any more, but there are GeckoStone^® paving stones available. Or more precisely, there are molds available: you buy the mold, and you create your own concrete gecko pavers. One more thing for the "someday we'll do the backyard" file.

Tuffits Concrete Garden Art

Sometimes, you learn the darndest things while reading tech books. In this case, I was looking at Creating a Web Page in Dreamweaver: Visual QuickProject Guide by Nolan Hester (which I recommend, btw) and ended up learning about Tuffits Concrete Garden Art:

Tuffits concrete stepping stones mimic the look and charm of vintage accent pillows. They look like they came right off your grandmother's divan! But because they're concrete, these pillows can stay outdoors year-round.

If it sounds odd, go look at the pictures. Given that the Escher paving stones I've blogged here about previously no longer appear to be available, and that these foam Escher lizards appear to be indoor-only, we may go with the Tuffits, instead.

Mac OS X 10.4: Fonts list

Another one of those things I know I'll want later: here's Apple's list of fonts that ship with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In short, it looks like you can depend on a Tiger machine having, at a minimum:

AmericanTypewriter
Andale Mono
Apple Chancery
Apple Symbols
Arial
Arial Black
Arial Narrow
Arial Rounded Bold
Baskerville
BigCaslon
Brush Script
Chalkboard
ChalkboardBold
Cochin
Comic Sans MS
Copperplate
Courier New
Courier
Didot
Futura
Geneva
Georgia
GillSans
HelveLTMM
Helvetica LT MM
Helvetica
HelveticaNeue
Herculanum
Hoefler Text
Impact
Keyboard
LastResort
LucidaGrande
MarkerFelt
Monaco
Optima
Papyrus
Skia
Symbol
Times LT MM
Times New Roman
Times
TimesLTMM
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
Webdings
ZapfDingbats
Zapfino

Sometimes I love my job

When you're a writer on tech topics, it's common to get emails about how you don't know what you're talking about. The better ones are when the writer of the email does know something about the topic, and writes to tell you how much they enjoyed your work.

But best of all is the two emails I just received, both of which raved about how much they loved the recent how-to article I wrote for Macworld. They arrived completely independently from each other, and were from the editor and the tech editor of the piece — the only two people to have read it so far.

The public won't be reading that article for a few months yet, but so far, I've got a great batting average on this one. I hope to do more along these lines, 'cause on top of the compliments, I also had a lot of fun writing it.

SNiF: Social Networking in Fur

With the introduction of SNiF, can we just declare all social networking systems dead?

We present SNiF: Social Networking in Fur, a system that allows pet owners to interact through their pets' social networks. SNiF comprises inexpensive hardware that can be unobtrusively and transparently affixed to pet collars and paraphernalia in order to augment pet-to-pet, pet-to-owner, and owner-to-owner interactions.

Deep Impact Wrap-up

A quick wrap-up of thoughts after watching last night's Deep Impact Mission...

• While Susan was guest-blogging the Planetary Society Comet Bash, someone from the Planetary Society was guest-blogging at JPL. It's a shame the latter wasn't better publicized.
  
  
• Here's NASA's Deep Impact Multimedia Page: images, movies, etc. Your tax dollars paid for it, so go check 'em out.
  
  
• I wish that NASA had had some way of getting and answering questions. An IRC channel, maybe, with someone picking out the best of the bunch? There was a lot of dead air during the broadcast last night, and Sean kept asking us questions we couldn't answer (and still can't). It would have been nice to have some way to solve both of those issues.

NightShift 1.0

For daredevils, and those who want to live on the edge: NightShift 1.0.

NightShift automatically downloads and updates WebKit, the Safari HTML rendering engine, to the latest nightly version. No user intervention is required, everything is fully automated.

• Downloads WebKit nightly build from web server
• Mounts the disk image
• Creates a backup of the previous version on disk
• Copies the new nightly build to its default location
• Launches the new version of WebKit
• Option to undo latest install and revert to last version
• Option to show the change log for past week

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Deep Impact tonight

If all goes well, NASA's Deep Impact mission will hit Comet Tempel 1 tonight. I'd heard that we could see it via our telescope, but it sounds like our best bet is watching via television. Here's the NASA TV schedule: (all times converted to PDT)

July 3, Sunday
4 p.m. - Deep Impact Pre-Impact Update - HQ (Replay)
8:30 p.m. - 12:30 a.m. (July 4) - Deep Impact Commentary (Expected time of impact: 10:52 p.m.)

And of course, keep an eye on 2020 Hindsight, as Susan always has the best NASA info and links.